Also, ad-free radio. I’ve completely eliminated FM/AM radio: I use things like last.fm, pandora, and rather than waking up to the radio I wake up to my own music. It’s all good.

Ad blocking add ons for your web browser.

A blindfold for billboards…haha, just kidding

Advertising is still everywhere, and hard to get rid of. I usually just block it out of my mind. Sadly, in the future it will only get worse…they will never stop coming up with new ways to brainwash us into buying products we don’t need.

There is no contract, implied or otherwise, that states I must allow a site’s ads to view its content. I have never clicked an ad on a website, except for sites where I seek out the advertisement (CraigsList, eBay, Froogle etc). Therefore, I block all ads except on the aforementioned sites, as I have no use for them. Advertising is disingenuous at best, and I refuse to allow some marketing shill to attempt to influence me.

In your analogy, if you are reading a magazine and you don’t want to “read the ads” you don’t have to, you just “skip past them.” If you’re watching time shifted TV you don’t have to “watch the commercials,” you just “skip through them.” If you’re driving down the road you don’t have to “read the billboards.” BUT, the ad has made an impression on you (positive, negative, whatever). In that sense it’s done its job.

By using AdBlocker (or another plug-in, or a custom HOSTS table, etc.) you’re not “skipping past” an advertisement, you’re blocking them entirely. And blocking definitely has its place, as I mentioned before, with malicious ads.

Yes, you are correct, by prohibiting people from reading the content if it’s detected that the ads didn’t display, one would loose viewership. For you and I that’s a big deal, for a large website, maybe not so much so.

Mark my words though, you’ll start seeing content providers start to detect whether their advertisements were displayed, and if they were they’ll likely block some or all of their content. (Perhaps letting you read the first paragraph and a half if they’re blocked, then telling you to un-block and return to read the rest.)

Anyhow, not trying to argue, just offering a different opinion and possibly a prediction of things to come.

Always good to hear your point-of-view, Dan!

I consider blocking ads to be the same as skipping TV commercials or ignoring ads in magazines and newspapers. The ads are there to make money, but just because you don’t read them doesn’t mean you’re stealing content. Especially in the case of pay per click ads, because whether a user blocks ads or not doesn’t change your earnings, so you’re no worse off when they block them. You might be better off if the ads are too annoying because without the ad blocker, they might stop visiting the site.

Your idea to force people to look at ads by putting up a message that they’re stealing is likely to alienate your visitors. I’m sure you’ve seen newspaper sites that load the entire page with blinking and flashing ads that make you go into epileptic fits. If I didn’t use Adblock, I wouldn’t visit those sites, so whether I use it or not, they’re not going to make money from me because I don’t like in-your-face ads.

As I said before, I really like Kris’ idea to whitelist sites that you want to support. In the future, I plan to do that, but I feel it is well within my right to view the content how I want to view it (like using RSS feeds) if it’s on the web. There are other options to force users to pay to read your content, like requiring a subscription or by writing a book.

It should be said that there are two types of online advertisements: pay per click, and some sort of pay per impression (the latter isn’t as simple as that, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll pretend that it is).

Pay per click ads (like I use on http://www.JoeLevi.com) present information either inline with one’s content, or in an “ad block” somewhere on the page. The site owner is only paid if someone clicks through the ad (and sometimes only if the clicker actually makes a purchase — affiliate programs work this way).

Impression ads typically pay you either by the amount of times the ad is shown on the page, or a flat rate per month (or other amount of time). Back before the dot com bubble burst, most advertising schemes worked this way, it was great for the site owner, but not so great for the advertiser.

The tricky part is, most people don’t know which type of advertising it is and just decide to block all of it (or all that they can). Whether they use a browser plug-in, standalone application, or a custom HOSTS file (or a combination), the bottom line is that the site owner, the person that is publishing the information that you’re reading, has decided that his or her content isn’t free, and rather than making you pay for a subscription (like the New York Times does), or micro-pay for the content, they opted to put ads on their page in the hopes that they wouldn’t be doing all this for free.

There are other site owners and content providers out there that have decided to give away their content (bandwidth, hosting costs, their own time, etc.). To these people I tip my hat; I’m not one of them. If people want to look at my information, they have to look at my ads. If they want to they can click on them so I get paid a little bit. If not, I don’t.

In my opinion, by blocking ads, you may as well be walking in to the bookstore and pocketing that book without paying for it. You’re looking at content that the author has presented on the condition that the ads be seen, and you’re preventing that.

Maybe there’s a way that I can have my web application look and see if a visitor is blocking ads, and if so block the contents of the site and present them with a message that they’re stealing.

The only caveat that I can see are malicious ads (any ad that spawns a new window or attempts to launch or install an application, steal data, or modify the behavior on my computer is malicious, again, in my opinion) or ads with questionable/objectionable material (True.com, pr0n, anything illegal in your jurisdiction, etc.). In which case you should write an email to the webmaster (and/or president, owner, moderator, administrator) and let them know that you value their content but not the ads that they’re running (include a screenshot, if possible). Tell the webmaster that you’ll check again in a week, and if the ads are still there, you’ll either discontinue visiting their site, or block their ads. At least you will have given them the opportunity to remove the offending material.

Thoughts?

That’s useful data about car repairs. I was mainly playing devil’s advocate to point out that even when we think we’re making a rational decision based on facts, we’ve often been affected by marketing hype.

It sounds like you’ve done your homework though. I too have researched cars on Consumer Reports and have come to the same conclusion (although there is quite a variance between different years of cars, even Japanese ones, so it pays to be vigilant when you’re buying).

One note on cars, a while back Consumer Reports presented a graph of repair incidents over the last 3 decades. In the 70s US autos had more than double the number of repairs of Japanese cars (European autos were in the middle). In the 80s the US cars improved, but so did everyone else. In the 90s the US cars dropped again to be about the same as the European cars but still above the Japanese. I feel this data is reliable and fairly accurate. It tells me, Japanese cars are still more reliable, but the difference is not as pronounced as it once was. I now consider buying US cars, but feel I must be careful in selecting a quality model; whereas there is seldom a Japanese “lemon” and I feel confident buying most models.